Health IT

Robots are taking over medicine. Will humans survive?

Robots are poised to take over the healthcare world in a way, Dr. Steven Wartman, president and CEO of the Association of Academic Health Centers, said at the Cleveland Clinic's sixth-annual Patient Experience: Empathy + Innovation Summit. He spoke about what he called the "marriage of medicine and machine" and examined the implications for patients and healthcare professionals.

Robot pharmacists dispense medicine. Nano robots administer targeted treatments for cancer and other maladies. Some help diagnose disease, such as by assisting with Pap tests, while others effectively provide round-the-clock care for the elderly. Surgical robotics is a multibillion-dollar industry.

Now, in a scenario straight out of science fiction, robots are poised to take over the healthcare world in a way, according to Dr. Steven Wartman, president and CEO of the Association of Academic Health Centers.

Tuesday to the Cleveland Clinic’s sixth-annual Patient Experience: Empathy + Innovation Summit, Wartman spoke about what he called the “marriage of medicine and machine” in a quick, engaging talk that touched on technology but got back to the central theme of empathy.

“We’re going to have a lot of fun for the next 30 minutes,” Wartman said, before showing a series of movie clips illustrating the “evolution” of human-machine relationships, as told by Hollywood, over the past three decades. His choices included “Short Circuit” (1986), “I, Robot” (2004) and “The Machine” (2013).

Wartman then showed a scene from the 2013 movie, “Her,” in which a lonely divorcee falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system, to frame the discussion around love of a machine.

“We’re in an era that I call the rise of the smart machines,” Wartman said. “It’s sort of sneaking up on us,” he explained. “I don’t think we’ve given it enough deep thought.”

(Afterwards, Wartman held court outside the meeting room and said he was optimistic that robots won’t turn evil, à la HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” nor would there be a “Terminator”-style Skynet extermination of the human race, despite the fact that he, perhaps subconsciously, referenced the subtitle of “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines” in one of his on-stage statements.)

“I don’t know where it’s going, but it’s going fast and we need to manage it,” Wartman said.

Wartman does not believe, however, that robots will displace humanity. “Will smart machines replace humans like internal-combustion engines replaced horses?” he asked, before showing a snippet of this viral video, entitled, “Humans Need Not Apply.”

“More and better technology will make more and better jobs for humans,” Wartman explained.

In healthcare, he called this the “new physics of patient care,” in which Einstein’s Theory of Relativity evolves to where E=MC4. (Wartman said he was inspired to create this vision by a TEDMED presentation that Intel’s Eric Dishman gave in 2009.)

In this case, however, M means the population, both individually and collectively, and the 4 Cs stand for:

  • Care anywhere — “People are getting very much inured to making one click and getting what they want,” Wartman said. People will be managed by their healthcare systems through their smartphones, he explained.
  • Care in teams —According to Wartman, the “sacrosanct” one-on-one relationship between doctor and patient is being supplanted by relationships with multiple professionals. “How do you gain the most value from being cared for by a team?” he asked.
  • Care in large data sets —”Eventually, I think we will all be continuously monitored,” Wartman said. “Well, what do we do with all this stuff?” He said healthcare needs a new “interpretive and functional infrastructure” to manage large amounts of data.
  • Care by machines. “Machines do not have to be perfect. They just have to make [fewer] mistakes than humans do,” according to Wartman. They offer the advantage of never getting tired or seeing their abilities decline with age. “Your HR department will not have a lot to do with them,” Wartman said.

“I’m concerned that we aren’t giving it the time and attention that it deserves. They’re kind of creeping into our daily tasks rather insidiously,” Wartman said.

He ended the half-hour with another movie clip, a dance scene from the newly released “Ex Machina.” “If you can dance with a robot, what else do you need?” Wartman quipped.

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